Abstract
What does it mean when pharmaceuticals are called ‘biologics’? This article follows a pregnant person who has been hospitalised on a Norwegian rheumatology ward after being taken off her monoclonal antibody (mab) medication. She is painfully trapped in a crisis that is medical and existential, but also epistemological. Weighing the debilitating consequences of her disease against concerns about pharmaceutical risks for herself and her unborn child, she creates and adapts her own knowledge of mabs as ‘biologics’. Far from being passively receptive, she thus becomes part of a complex project of semantics where analogies and oppositions of biologic and chemical, natural and man-made, health and unhealth work to render some knowledge plausible and some implausible. Placing the individual and the pharmaceutical label at the centre of this semantic economy, the article suggests that pharmaceutical labels play an important albeit unacknowledged role in the making of pharmaceuticals as safe and efficacious.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.